Buy a dog.

The social scene at a calmer brain state is much more comfortable, but it's also clear that my experience have been neither a mirage nor just "my problem". Greeting someone and not being acknowledged, or trying without success to join a conversation, those aren't subtle cues. That weird sensation of being in a group who pretended that I was not there was not an illusion. Now that I have a better assessment and some independent confirmation, I know I'm not crazy anyway.

I had a romantic idea of what friendship was, which is no more realistic than romantic ideas about sex. That's especially true in a group that gathers in a neutral spot to share intentionally superficial good times. Even setting aside the explicit rejection and demotion lately, it's clear I've made some ten-year mistakes and attributed importance to friendships that was entirely mine and not shared.

Discovering that I'm relatively unimportant to people I cared about a lot is disagreeable but at least liberating. I can dispense with a lot of tiring attempts to Do The Right Thing and Be A Good Friend and do as they do with me: enjoy them when they're entertaining and avoid them when they aren't. This is the meaning of friendship in the local dialect, which I mistranslated for my own reasons.

Replacing unavailable intimacy with overrated friendship was a necessary error. Even good friends aren't family or lovers. As an outsider in a group that celebrated the no-obligations flexibility of coffee-house tables as an ideal, I wasn't going to find too many of those friends anyway.

I'm still pretty upset about some of my discoveries lately, but not fatally. It'll stop being important to me as time goes by. And fair weather isn't a bad time to shoot the shit on a patio, with whomever shows up and decides I'll do for an hour or two.

Failing that I can just leave the headphones on more often.

Wait, does it go in your EAR?

I'm sure most of you have seen this because it was on boingboing, etc., but a number of people I saw tonight hadn't: The Sex Machines Next Door is an amazing article and even more amazing pictures of homebrew sex machines that various residents of America Fuck Yeah! have created.

The Popular Mechanics can-do spirit meets Edward Gorey's The Curious Sofa. Pocketa pocketa pocketa. Wait, where do you sit? How does that even... Oh MAN no WAY!

The Wired article references a new book. Fascinating.

Also, wait wait wait. That thing moves HOW? And you're on the GARAGE FLOOR?

Patio Nights: Bad boys, bad boys

Some of you might remember the strange doings in the insurance office upstairs from the patio. The youngish woman who's apparently the daughter of the insurance agent using the office at night, lots of comings and goings of obviously freaked out addicts, bad scenes with people waving knives and yelling and kicking things. We were on the verge of calling the cops, mostly because she had her young son around for all this fun and because there are a lot of children on the patio who really shouldn't have to deal with tweakers flailing about waving sharpened screwdrivers.

And then it all stopped. She still showed up but seemed to be doing legit daytime business stuff, and had a guy with her who looked like he had a job and was nice to the kid, and I thought "well good, she stopped dealing".

Last night she was there with That Guy Who Gets Arrested On Cops, and they were playing yell at each other and slam the door for an hour or so. It wasn't clear what was going on, but we started to wonder if she was trying to leave and he kept slamming the door on her. Or whether the quiet bits meant that she was being strangled. Or whether the kid was there. Around the time we were thinking seriously we should call the cops, the door opened and Loser Boy appeared. His first act was to dump a cup of ice from the second floor balcony on to bruisedhips which was a mistake, because that's when the cops got called.

They showed up in about 30 seconds and were oddly casual. While both of them were talking to her inside, Arrest-Me-Now popped off his keychain, slipped down the stairs, and disappeared. Sierra pointed out that he probably lost the keychain so he could hop the fence in back more easily, because Sierra is O.G. from H.B. and thinks that way. Obviously Bluto didn't want to talk to any cops at length last night.

No idea what happened to her. Part of me sympathizes with her obviously wretched life and wants Things To Get Better, but considering what she's putting her kid through it might be better if she spent some time in the snicker while Grampa raised Junior. Whatever's going on, it's not the six-year-old's fault.

I'm mostly a small-L libertarian about "drugs", but speed is such a terrible, terrible thing.

I AM INDEPENDENT, HYGENIC

Apparently the new euphemism for "super extra old" in personals is "mellowed".

http://orangecounty.craigslist.org/w4m/112416522.html

Screenshot below the cut for if'n it's pulled.

( have you never been mellow )

the way to a man's heart

1. Watch for aliens on the amazing Pyramid Cam.
   
   
2. Someone got so upset over a frequently misused phrase that an entire website was created with t-shirt sales and a mail archive.
   
   
3. We Make Money Not Art went to the Murakami exhibit and saw cool things.

Hot celebs spoon as normal human reacts

The lady in the foreground has the expression on her face that I would if my swimming hole filled up with tongue-wrestling famous beautiful people. Who the fuck are you? Where the hell are my cigarettes? I want to buy this lady a drink.

RAT! SCABIES!

Demos done by Rat Scabies with members of the Godfathers, found via The Vinyl Mine, are downloadable via this page. I'd never heard of this thing, some project in 2003. Good punkly stuff.

Uh, yeah.

This explains why I have been having such social success and why I am a well-known scientist:

( intuition quiz )